Overview of China Automobile and Components & Parts Industry

China’s national economy has kept steady and fast growth since 2000. From 2001 to 2007, the automobile industry was in the golden age. In 2001, the automobile production volume and sales volume reached 2.2469 million sets and 2.3585 million sets respectively in China. The production volume and sales volume of automobiles was 8.7486 million and 8.7915 million by 2007, at an annual growth rate of 25.43% and 24.52% respectively. Despite the global financial crisis since 2008, the domestic automobile industry has enjoyed a rapid growth because of the supportive government policies. From 2008 to 2016, the production volume of automobiles increased from 9.1897 million sets to 28.1188 million sets, at an annual growth rate of 15.00%. The sales volume also increased from 9.3805 million sets to 28.0282 million sets, at an annual growth rate of 14.66%.

Development Status of Automobile Components and Parts Industry in China

The vehicle production and sales volume and car ownership in China keep increasing, and the procurement of auto parts go global. As a result, the automobile parts industry has made great progress. Its development status is as follows:

Since China joined WTO, the automobile parts industry has rapidly expanded. The industrial production value grew at a CAGR of 23.10% from 2001 to 2015, higher than 18.86%, an average annual growth rate of the gross production value.

Due to the support from industry policies and global integration of auto parts procurement, the export scale of automobile parts in China is rapidly expanding. The main export countries and regions are the U.S., Japan and the European Union with developed industry. The export value of China auto parts increased from USD 28.691 billion in 2007 to USD 64.573 billion in 2016 with the annual average growth rate of 9.43%.

However, the production value of China auto parts industry accounts for about 30% of the gross production value of the automobile industry, far lower than that of developed countries (60%-70%). The main reason is that the domestic automobile parts enterprises mostly focus on products with low added value. On one hand, in terms of key components and parts, they are poor in the techniques of designing, developing and manufacturing and the supply chain management, finding it hard to meet the high requirements of vehicle matching in transnational automobile enterprises. On the other hand, they lack technological strengths such as synchronous

development of vehicles and system integration of spare parts. Thus, the imported key parts cannot be replaced on a large scale by the local ones in a short time.

It is estimated that laser diode headlamps will be applied to new-type limousines in China around 2020 while LED headlamps will be more often used in ordinary automobiles. As time goes by, halogen lamps and HID lamps will each exhibit a shrinking market.

According to CRI, foreign-invested enterprises have a prominent advantage in China’s automobile air-conditioner market. Especially in the whole-vehicle OEM market, foreign-invested enterprises take up a majority of market shares.